31 Oct 08 Read It Later

Given that you’re a Metafilter user, if you’re also a Firefox user, you may want to check out the Read It Later extension. It’s not an unfair assumption to assume that Metafilter users tend to do a lot of online reading (who, us?), and the Read It Later extension is well-suited to help you manage your online reading while not cluttering up your bookmarks. It began as a bookmarklet but now has its own online site, RSS feed, intracomputer syncing, caching of pages for offline use, integration with Google Reader, and customizable keyboard shortcuts, and has really matured into a really great (free) extension.

30 Oct 08 Taxpayers: Here’s $700 billion. Banks: Thanks. Now Fuck Off!

JPMorgan Chase: Thanks for the $700 billion. Lending? Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Fuck off!

In his column on Saturday, The Times’s Joe Nocera told about a conference call that he had listened in on recently between employees and executives of JPMorgan Chase. Asked how an infusion of $25 billion of bailout funds would change the bank’s lending policy, an executive said the money would be used to buy other banks.

“I think there are going to be some great opportunities for us to grow in this environment, and I think we have an opportunity to use that $25 billion in that way,” the executive said. He added that the money could also be used as a backstop in case “recession turns into depression or what happens in the future.”

There was not a word about lending — not to businesses or home buyers or car buyers or students or other consumers. Just the opposite. In response to another question, the executive said that the bank expected to continue to tighten credit.

30 Oct 08 Wazzup: Then and Now

Now:

And, for reference, then:

Like the rest of us, the Wazzup boys have seen better days …

30 Oct 08 Foreclosure Angel

Honestly, you think sometimes that humanity is full of the worst of us. And then, sometimes, you see stories like this, and you realize that there are utterly wonderful people in this world, and that there is kindness out there and people who care about others even though they’ve never met them.

You need to watch this.

30 Oct 08 Nothing is Sacred to the GOP, Not Even a Deathbed

Just to show you the kind of slime that is currently holding the Republican Party hostage …

MSNBC anchor David Schuster asked GOP strategist Brad Blakeman about the Republican National Committee buying $150,000 worth of clothes for Gov. Palin.

Blakeman responded that “the real outrage” was Senator Obama “taking a 767 campaign plane to go visit GRANDMA.”

You know … the one that’s pretty much on her deathbed, and may not live until Election Day?

30 Oct 08 Net Crap (10/29 - 10/30)

These are things I ran across recently on the Internet and thought were interesting, remarkable, or stood out in some way to me.

29 Oct 08 Unfinished Swan

29 Oct 08 Synchronized Presidential Debating

This is utterly wonderful:

24 Oct 08 Net Crap (10/21 - 10/24)

These are things I ran across recently on the Internet and thought were interesting, remarkable, or stood out in some way to me.

22 Oct 08 Yo Momma So Fat (Election Edition)

Boing Boing — which I unsubscribed from my RSS but occasionally begrudgingly browse — brought to my attention a mass election-themed Dozens exchange going on over Twitter. Here’s a lot of people’s contributions all concatenated together (these ones I didn’t write) from Twitter (where it originated and is still going), BoingBoing, and MetaTalk:

Yo momma so fat, she authorized a $700 billion bailout of Dairy Queen.

Yo momma so fat, she thinks the G8 is a Value Meal.

Yo momma so fat, her other biography is called The Audacity of Hardee’s.

Yo momma so fat, the only Supreme Court verdict she wants to overturn is HomeTown Buffet v. Yo Momma.

Yo momma so fat, she thinks sub-prime is a steak cut.

Yo momma so fat, McCain refers to her as “Those Ones.”

Yo momma so fat, when they asked which menus she reads, she said “You know, all of ‘em.”

Yo momma so ugly, Obama said “You can put lipstick on a pig and it would look a lot like yo momma on dollar margarita night.”

Yo momma so fat, ACORN registered her to vote three times.

Yo momma so fat, Russia can see her from their house.

Yo momma’s such a ho, the tab for the federal bailout plan is “700 billion dollars, plus fifty cents to have sex with yo momma.”

Yo momma so stupid, she tried to arrange the genres on her iPod to put Country First.

Yo momma so fat, McCain gives patronizing air quotes when he talks about the “health of yo momma.”

Yo momma so fat, when they asked which menus she reads, she said “You know, all of ‘em.”

Yo momma so fat, McCain refers to her as “Those Ones.”

Yo momma’s such a ho, she wants to teach “comprehensive sex education” to kindergartners.

Yo momma so fat, she is the trade deficit with China.

Yo momma so fat, she is the budget deficit in California.

Yo momma so fat, when she stops eating the Dow falls 300 points.

Yo momma so fat, when she stops eating Iceland goes bankrupt.

Yo momma so fat, the price of oil is linked to her trips to the grocery store.

Yo momma so fat, her BBQ is a leading cause of global warming.

Yo momma so fat, she is a weapon of mass destruction.

Yo momma’s such a ho, the recession will end when she puts her panties on.

Yo momma so dumb, she thinks you can check into the “Hanoi Hilton.”

Yo momma so dumb, she, too, can see Vladimir Putin’s head floating over Alaska.

Yo momma so fat, they used her a storm surge barrier in Hurricane Ike.

Yo momma so fat, she calls Joe the Plumber when she gotta urinary tract infection.

Yo momma so fat, she doesn’t know how many houses she sits around, but she really sits around them.

Yo momma so fat, they had to get the whole cast of SNL to play her.

Yo momma so slutty, even the McCain campaign won’t pull out of her.

Yo momma so nasty, Joe the Plumber had to tell her to stop “sharing the wealth”.

Yo momma so fat, Nate Silver has revolutionized the science of trying to weigh her.

Yo momma so fat, when John McCain says “my friends”, he’s talking to her plural chins.

Yo momma so fat, not even the GOP can purge her rolls!

And my own contributions:

Yo momma so fat, West Virginia voting machines magically switch their votes from “Obama” to “Yo Momma” ’cause they afraid she gonna sit on them.

Yo momma’s such a ho, there’s a daily blog dedicated to her ho-i-ness called “Daily Hos“, run by Marhos Houlitsas.

Yo momma so stupid and vegan, when someone tried to stake vampire McCain, she protested.

Yo momma so vegan, she’s voting for McCain/Palin because every egg is precious.

Yo momma so ugly, people say “What’s McCain doin’ in a dress?”

(The vegan ones are due to a weird little digression in the message forum where I initially posted these.)

And, when I reposted this on BoingBoing, I couldn’t help but add:

Yo momma so fat, she ate all the vowels in a BoingBoing thread.

(reference 1, reference 2, reference 3)

Also, did you know Shakespeare yo-momma’d?

Painter: Y’are a dog.
Apemantus: Thy mother’s of my generation. What’s she, if I be a dog?

— Timon of Athens, Act I, Scene 1

Demetrius: Villain, what hast thou done?
Aaron: That which thou canst not undo.
Chiron: Thou hast undone our mother.
Aaron: Villain, I have done thy mother.

— Titus Andronicus, Act IV, Scene II

21 Oct 08 Net Crap (10/20)

These are things I ran across recently on the Internet and thought were interesting, remarkable, or stood out in some way to me.

20 Oct 08 Vote for Hope

20 Oct 08 Powell Endorses Obama

Gen. Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama. I’m especially approving of what he begins to say around 4 minutes, 57 seconds into it:

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards–Purple Heart, Bronze Star–showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life. Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way.

20 Oct 08 Net Crap (10/17 - 10/20)

These are things I ran across recently on the Internet and thought were interesting, remarkable, or stood out in some way to me.

17 Oct 08 Chicago Tribune Endorses First Democratic Nominee in 161-Year History

The Chicago Tribune has been a bastion of Republican endorsements, having consistently endorsed every single Republican presidential nominee since it was founded in 1847. One of its earliest managing editors, Joseph Medill, was a founder of the Republican Party. Today, it endorsed its first Democratic presidential candidate in its 161-year history. And it certainly did not do so halfheartedly.

15 Oct 08 When She Turns 18, I Almost Guarantee She’s Going to Rename Herself Michelle

was born on Friday, October 10, 2008. Except that her name wasn’t Ava Marie Ciptak. Her father, Mark, of Elizabethton, Tennessee, “sort of secretively went behind [his wife Layla]’s back and changed the paperwork” by using two separate birth certificate forms. Instead of naming his daughter John McCain — his initial plan — he named his daughter Sarah McCain Palin, “figuring hopefully [he] would get two weeks in the doghouse rather than two months.”

14 Oct 08 Net Crap (10/13 - 10/14)

These are things I ran across recently on the Internet and thought were interesting, remarkable, or stood out in some way to me.

14 Oct 08 Diane Duane’s “The Big Meow”: A Study In How Not to Do Fan-Supported Fiction

I have experienced a myriad of moments in my life where emotions that mix about as well as oil and water are nonetheless both simultaneously present in my mind, leading to odd emotional experiences. When it comes to the subject of Diane Duane, I have felt that odd mixture for a while — but, fortunately, no longer.

Diane Duane is an author of science fiction and urban fantasy. For me, she has been, ever since my adolescence, one of those authors whose every book I not only admired and deeply enjoyed, but felt as if I had learned something new about the universe, or something had been clarified or expressed in just that certain way that felt as if, yes, that was described right, that is how that part of existence is. So, needless to say, I enjoyed all of her works to a rather significant degree.

I don’t anticipate ever not loving Ms. Duane’s novels. Should I be offered the ability to purchase traditionally published works of hers in a bookstore in the future, I will likely do so.

However, should I be presented with the option of directly supporting one of her projects with no middleman present, I most certainly will never do so ever again.

In December 2005, Ms. Duane publicly contemplated about writing the third novel in her Feline Wizards series as a fan-funded project. She conducted a straw poll on her blog, which BoingBoing promoted, and the response was enthusiastic enough it was considered a go in February 2006.

Many people entered into this business relationship with Ms. Duane. Before a single page was first seen, they gave her different amounts of money. People simply prepaying for the book paid prices larger than one might pay in the bookshop, but some people even gave her what were called “challenge grants” — $400, and one poor soul gave her $1,000, saying, “I had a hand in making it possible for a piece of art to enter the world.”

The problem, however, is that Ms. Duane has not treated this like the professional obligation it is, and has left her fans hanging — while having took their money, mind you, and even still soliciting subscribers — for well over two and a half years by now. A history of her “deadlines”:

During this time, however, it is not as if life interfered with at least one style of writing: she actively posted a great deal to her weblog. I won’t spend time counting the individual posts, but they are not small in number, and they make it clear that Ms. Duane was sitting at a keyboard in front of a computer, during this time when chapters were delinquent by months. One example: in October 2006 she wrote two extremely lengthy posts (1, 2) on “Where No One Has Gone Before,” a first season episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation which Ms. Duane co-authored — this being in response to a humorous review by Wil Wheaton. (Don’t get me wrong: as a fan of the series and of the novel which inspired the episode, I found it quite interesting. But that doesn’t contradict the point.)

Finally, very much later, in July 2008, she returned to the project and published Chapter 7, saying we’d see a new chapter every three weeks. But then, in a style of which Lucy van Pelt would be oh-so-very proud, she yanked the football away again, resuming the old style.

Chapter 8 would be up August 20 (promised 7/28).

Then: once again, “life” interfered. As did a Discworld convention. So, August 27th (promised 8/20).

Then, she needed a couple more days. So, August 28th or 29th (promised 8/27).

Then, a month later, it would be “this weekend” (which would’ve been September 26-28) (promised 9/25).

Yoink.

whoosh

THUD.

And today, 20+ days later … need it even be said? If it were up, would this post be up?

I opened this article by saying that I had two emotions that were conflicting, but that one was dissolving, making the entire mixture rest easier.

The two emotions were these: admiration and anger. I used to deeply admire Ms. Duane’s writings while, at the same time, being actively angry at her.

Now, that anger has pretty nearly died. I’m just resigned to the fact that I was screwed over by my favorite author, over and over again, whether or not she’s a nice person, or whether or not she meant it.

[shrug] I got screwed — intentionally or no — by someone I trusted not to screw me. Not the first time that’s happened. Won’t be the last.

I’m resigned to the fact that this is what evidently Ms. Duane is going to do. And, moreover, even were my blog post somehow to meet her eyes and cause what the alcoholics call a moment of clarity, creating a sudden sense of accountability, this is what she already HAS done.

I have given up any hope whatsoever that we’re going to see a conclusion to this book anytime soon, if at all. And as for the extra money for a hardback version once it’s done, well, I’m tempted to say I’ll eat every creamy delicious page if it actually ever shows up in my hands. Except that that would really screw with my digestive system.

In my life, one thing I’ve learned as I have phased into adulthood has been to distinguish between the person intrinsic, their existence; and the behavior they exhibit.

I still can love her writing, independent from this. And I imagine that intrinsic to herself, the person who she is … is not intrinsically malicious or evil or out to monetarily screw fans or what-have-you. In fact, I imagine she is a pretty dynamite, well-rounded, cool person to know, if she’s got the well of life experience from which to draw what she’s written about all these years.

But, separately, the behavior she’s exhibiting in this situation? It’s absolutely abysmal. She is my favorite author … but this just flat-out sucks.

My own amateur post-game analysis: the problem with this process was this … I am assuming that we paid Ms. Duane the equivalent of a disproportionate advance — we gave her nearly all of the revenue she could expect from this project up front, and in the case of the sizeable challenge grants given, perhaps even more than could have first been anticipated. (I know nothing about what authors, or Ms. Duane specifically, are paid. So this assumption may be presumptuous.) We did so with no legally binding force upon her requiring her to deliver the project under particular circumstances. And we did so allowing the author herself to set the deadlines. I don’t imagine there are a great deal of formal author-publisher relationships in this world with those conditions — and for good reason.

We did this because of an inherent trust in Ms. Duane, based on an admiration of her as an author. However, we had never done business directly with her — she had a business relationship with a middleman (a publisher), who itself had a business relationship with yet another middleman (a book chain or individual bookstore), who then had a business relationship with us (purchaser-seller). But directly with her, in the context of people to whom she owed a professional obligation? That’s a relationship we never had with her directly — and a role none of us had ever played.

The problem with entering into a business relationship with someone whom you’ve only admired from a distance is that you tend to blur your admiration about whatever you admire about them, letting it bleed into your appraisal of them concerning the transaction you’re performing. I admired Ms. Duane because of her writing. And because of that, it never even occurred to me for a second that nearly three years later, she would have permitted the novel to be half-done, delayed over and over again for months on end. I didn’t think that she’d, well, be the kind of person to permit that.¹

I am not an author or involved in the publishing industry, but I am not delving into complex aspects of the process when I say: in a traditional publishing relationship, were an author to accept a unusually disproportionate advance and then go quite literally years past the deadline, unless there was an unusually compassionate relationship at play with the publisher, by now, she would have been required to return the advance.

A delinquent professional obligation should not be secondary in priority to attending a Discworld convention.

A delinquent professional obligation should not be secondary in priority to recreationally writing hundreds of blog posts.

Medical problems that prevent you from working? Deeply sick family that require long-term care? These are of course understandable. They don’t negate the fact that a professional obligation is outstanding, but only the coldest of hearts would not be understanding. (I daresay that when it comes to legal contracts and prepaid advances, some publishers do have very cold hearts, however. Fortunately, her fans don’t.) Still, in such a situation, in the publisher-author version of this situation, I can easily imagine there being some representative from the publisher, gingerly and with great sensitivity trying to ascertain the status of things so as to determine for the publisher what needed to be done with the project.

If I were to put myself into Ms. Duane’s shoes right now — poof, I am suddenly looking out from her eyes and have to deal with this problem — this is what I feel are her ethical choices right now. To dictate her choices to her is presumptuous as well, but hell, I’m disgruntled, so I’ll just go ahead anyway.

The first two courses of action assume that my household’s financial status can withstand said actions:

Option #1: Finishing the Novel: If I feel that I can complete this project on an immediate schedule, then I return a sizeable percentage of all payments my reader-investors made (ideally half, but maybe a third) — including challenge grants (poor Ted Ts’o² and his lost $1000) — as a honorable gesture for by this point already having seriously breached the trust my reader-investors initially placed in me. I treat the remaining chapters as my highest professional priority, because my “publishers” in this case have let me keep my advance for years now and are still waiting for what they paid for. I issue a publishing schedule and stick to it, because an unmet publishing schedule is now, unfortunately, considered de rigeur for me.

Option #2: Not Finishing the Novel: If I feel that I cannot meet my obligation, then I return 100% of all payments to readers, including any challenge grants given to me. If I’m feeling particularly noble, then I also calculate how much interest that sum would have earned over that time given an interest rate equivalent to the average American savings account during that time, and include that amount.

If my household’s financial status cannot withstand it³:

Option #3: Not Finishing the Novel But Not Instantly Returning the Funds: If I cannot financially return the funds yet cannot go ahead with this project, then I publicly declare the project dead and e-mail all of my reader-investors. Making monthly payments as one would with a credit card would enact a lot of Paypal transaction fees, not to mention a unfairly hellish amount of processing, so a lump-sum return payment would be made at some point in the future, but this time with the interest of whatever a low-interest credit card (say 4-5%) would’ve accumulated in finance charges during that time.

To me, these are the only honorable ways to go from this position.

But importantly, I make a BINARY decision whether to finish the novel.

Yes.

No.

One of those two choices only.

If yes, then I create a schedule and by God stick to it as if all the hordes of Random House will sue me into non-existence if I don’t meet it, even if it is just the bank accounts of my fans which I’m dealing with. It is my highest priority because it is the trust of my fans I have already repeatedly violated.

If no, then I don’t finish the novel.

I DON’T try to adopt a actually-non-existent gray area where re-drafting and re-re-drafting and re-re-re-drafting a publishing schedule somehow meets the obligation incurred by my agreement with my fans.

This is what I would do, were I her, but I’m not her. And I’ve, sadly enough, just … given up on her. We all have a synopsis in our head about subjects … if we’re asked to describe someone or something, we have a narrative about them. We have common narratives about 9/11, about Dubya, and so on.

My narrative about Ms. Duane used to be unflinchingly positive: a brilliant author who continually had some amazing and creative ideas, a flair for amazing characters and imaginative creations — “you have to read her!!!”

I can still say that about her writing. That part of her narrative hasn’t changed in my head. But now, there’s a new line to it.

Dad always purposefully humorously misattributes this line to Scotty⁴: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Given the number of publishing schedules she’s self-issued and then not met, I think at this point, we’re at the little-known continuation of that maxim: “Fool me forty-one times, I’d have to be really fucking gullible to believe anything different at this point.”

UPDATE 11/16/08: Phyllis points me to two podcasts — recorded on December 16, 2006 — in which Diane talked about the publishing model (part 1, part 2). Her comments there are indeed quite interesting. If I wanted to be a jerk and make cheap shots, there’s a remark I could purposefully interpret wrong, about “immediate access” to “the readership’s money”, but the context makes it obvious that that comment was not avaricious in nature, but instead a simple statement that such immediate funding made the project financially feasible for her. Anyway, the first of two quotes:

“The only thing that has annoyed me this year is a series of personal problems and injuries that has slowed me down incredibly, and it’s just typical that in a year when you would commit to do something so public that was time-sensitive, that suddenly you know I’m spraining my ankle every three months, and Peter’s mother has been ill which has meant we’ve been going up and down from here to Belfast a great deal, other stuff going on, it’s been a weird, weird year and has made this project in some ways annoying for me in ways that I wish it weren’t. I should’ve been all done now, in fact, it should have been back from the editor by now, I’ve been hoping to go to press in January of ‘08, excuse me, ‘07, and that’s not going to happen now, it’s probably not going to happen until sort of March, if I, you know, get this thing in the can by the beginning of January. If I had all this to do again, I think I would do what my honorable colleagues on the other side of the water here are doing, and get it in the can first before letting it out of the house.”

When asked for advice to give to authors considering the same “storyteller’s bowl” method:

“Get it in the can, first. [laughs] Seriously. Feel out your audience and make sure I suppose first of all that the demand is there, because we all realize that our time costs money. We all have husbands and wives and cats and dogs and kids and things to feed, and it is dangerous to too willingly throw the normal channels of operation yover our shoulder and say, ‘No, I’m going to do it this way.’ That said, once you’re certain of your market, yeah, go ahead, but really, I would say: get it in the can, first.”

Separately, going to her website for the first time, I was frowning at a few things: she had a manga that went to press in September ‘07 and a short story that went to press in November ‘07.

And A Wizard on Mars was being done with the same model at the same time, but with a similar subset of disgruntled fans. Back in May ‘08, a commenter complains:

We’ve been waiting for like, three years. It was supposed to be released fall 2006, then fall 2007, and now it says fall 2008. It’s alomst summer 2008, and we don’t have a release date yet. Is anyone else getting a little impatient?

Fortunately for them, however, Amazon Canada has that coming out on March 15, 2009 — although amazon.com doesn’t.

So take all of the above essay and multiply it by two? Wow.

12 Oct 08 Net Crap (10/12)

These are things I ran across recently on the Internet and thought were interesting, remarkable, or stood out in some way to me.